A year ago, my friend Jordan crossed over.
He and his wife packed their bags and took off over the Tasman. The plane stopped over in New Zealand and they got off. (And still have not resumed their flight.)
Jordan is a person with a passion for design. It spills over into every area of his life. He even gets paid to design! Join me on a magical tour of mystery and intrigue as we spend five minutes getting acquainted with the world of Jordan ...
Celebrating Design: Jordan, it's 9 o'clock on Monday morning. You're at your desk. Can you tell us what the rest of the day might look like from here?
Jordan: At the moment I work predominantly doing web design, and the work itself falls pretty generally into two categories.
The first is the creation of static 'mock-ups' or a visual representation of how the website is going to look and behave. This mock-up is purely non-functional, however you need to keep the way everything will work in mind throughout. This is probably the part that is more traditionally considered the 'design' phase.
The second is the process of actually creating a working site from the design. We have programmers who handle the content-management system that we plug into, and any of the really technical workings.
Our part is applying the basic structure of the page in a way that is meaningful, useable and understandable, and styling that structure to match the design that has been approved. Any given day will probably involve aspects of both of these as well as ongoing tweaks to existing sites, quoting for work, and the administative side of things.
CD: Your job title is 'designer'. How much do you feel that your job allows you to work in that space of 'design'?
J: To be honest, this often depends a lot on the client. A good client is one that presents the problems that need solving, the goals that need achieving with the site, and trusts us to come up with a solution to it.
What more often happens is that the client comes to us with the solution they want, and just want us to make it look 'pretty' and make it work. So sometimes we work more as 'implementers' than designers - which can be frustrating. But it's part of working for clients, instead of for yourself.
That being said, even when we are implementing someone else's idea, there is still a lot of 'design' in the process; you just have more constraints and limitations to juggle.
CD: How do you determine what a good design is? How do you know when your work on a job is complete (besides the money running out!)?
J: It's a fine line. You can always look at something and see things that need doing (or at least I can), but there's a point you reach where you don't want to be over-thinking everything, and you just have to accept that the work is done.
Oftentimes this coincides with when the site has to go live, or when the client needs it done. You could still nitpick bits and pieces for days afterwards, but you have to leave it.
As far as 'good design' goes, I think it is often relative to who it is targeted for. When I look at something someone has done and it makes me go "Wow!", or is memorable, or makes me think about something I might not have before, then that is good design.
However, when I am working for clients, good design is about providing a solution that solves their problem.
It's all about context. Good design for an older market will be vastly different to what is good design for a much younger market. Good design communicates clearly and emphatically to the people it is directed to -whatever that message may be.
CD: How do you take a client's desires into account when you design for them? How do you maintain your own distinctive while doing another person's work?
J: In doing commercial work the client's desires are the ones that count. But if we have different ideas we can justify as solving what the client wants BETTER than what they desire, then our ideas start coming into play.
Design is always about working within limitations, and there is always room to have your own mark on what you do. It just may be to a greater or lesser extent in some cases.
CD: How does the concept of design spill over into other areas of your life besides work?
J: In a very narrow sense, I like to experience good design - whether it be in print, on the web, or even in interior design or industrial design. The ability for man to create things which are aesthetically and functionally pleasing is astounding.
But in a larger sense it is even more astounding to see the design (both functional and aesthetic) in our lives and the world around us. When you look at nature, when you look at the human body, when you look at your own life and see the twists-and-turns it has taken to make you what you are, I find it impossible to believe that it all happens by chance. There is design behind it, and there is a Designer behind it too.
CD: Do you have a story which will tell us something about your early interest in design? Do you remember which event helped you decide to pursue a job centred on design?
J: I must have enjoyed that sort of thing through high school, as I was always involved with creating the youth group term programme booklet and flyers and other things like that.
But don't think I realised I could do that sort of thing for a living until I started doing more of it for statewide Presbyterian Youth (while I was deferring Uni for a year). I was helping with booklets for camps, tickets for things, sometimes even video editing work.
Instead of going to Uni after my deferment ended, I went and studied Interactive Multimedia at TAFE and started heading down the path I am on now. I still find it quite amusing to look at the work I did very early on, and how far I have come from it. (http://www.jordesign.com/v1/)
CD: Is there anyone in particular who inspires or encourages you to design?
J: I find inspiration mostly through other people's work, though not in the way you might expect. I find that searching websites for inspiration when designing a website (for example) tends to make you copy more than design. But it's always interesting to see how an idea used in film titles, or in a poster can inform the work you do on a website.
In terms of names I would have to mention Josef Muller Brockman, Jan Tischold, Saul Bass, Jason Santa Maria, Dan Cedarholm and Jon Hicks, for various different reasons.
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